Up For Grabs

peacetime and so honest it hurt, people who stole military equipment in wartime were like maggots in cheese. A landowner in his home county of Devon, he had done all the right things, hunting, shooting, fishing and the rest, and to his blunt mind there were only two shades – black and white. He had won his MC in the holocaust that was the first day of the Somme in 1916 and the bar to it in the same area in 1918. By 1939, he had in the very nature of things grown a little pompous, but he was patriotic and brave and, confident the army would welcome him back with open arms, had left his adoring wife and family and offered himself once more, fully expecting to face the enemy at once with teeth bared and eyes ablaze. At fifty-one, however, Dampier was a touch too old for front-line stuff and, to his fury, he was given the humdrum job of running a training camp in the north of England until he finally exploded and demanded to be sent where there was some risk to life and limb. The army obliged by sending him to Cairo, where, if anything, he was safer than in England and you had to look very hard about you to find the war. There was certainly no sign of it in the Gezira Sporting Club or the Continental Roof Garden, though it was occasionally mentioned at the Turf Club.

To his disgust he found himself laying on concerts and film shows for back-area troops, to say nothing of boxing and cricket tournaments and football matches against Egyptian teams. A second furious explosion translated him once more, this time into the head of a team investigating the disappearance of army equipment. In his no-nonsense way, Winston Churchill in London had noticed a vast discrepancy between the stores shown in the manifests of merchant ships aimed at the Middle East and those which the army claimed to have available for use, and had demanded that someone should do something about it. Because everybody else was comfortably established and Dampier was a newcomer – and a nuisance to boot – he found himself with a lorry and a brief to investigate.

At the permanent camps round Tel el Kebir he found the pilfering was amazing. A two-ton charging plant had been removed miraculously on donkeys between dusk and dawn; and a consignment of fifty thousand razor blades destined for the troops had dwindled to twenty-five thousand by the time it reached the army canteens. It didn’t take him long to decide that the Sudanese watchmen recruited for their honesty were in reality the eyes and ears of the gangs.

Without realizing it, the army had picked the right man for the job. Cairo had always been noted for its thieves, prostitutes, pimps and swindlers, and the arrival of a vast army had merely worsened the situation. Caught up in the vast net of conscription, it was inevitable that a few shysters had arrived in the Egyptian capital and it hadn’t taken them long to realize that the army, preoccupied with fighting the war in the desert, had little time to look after its rear end, and almost at once a traffic in spare parts, tyres, food, even arms, had sprung up. Soldiers who fell for Egyptian girls in the cabarets in Emad-el-Din Street overstayed their leave and, provided the girl they followed home hadn’t a large boyfriend waiting round the corner with a knife, became the target for Egyptian wide boys eager to get them into their clutches.

In addition, the War Department employed four hundred thousand Egyptian civilians who had no compunction about robbing it blind. Even the payroll system for hired help invited frauds. And when the vehicles of the Société des Autobus du Nord came to a standstill for lack of tyres, supplies with the War Department mark removed quickly arrived from the army dumps, with steel, chemicals, textiles, cigarettes and food, all of which were up for grabs and leaking in a steady stream from military warehouses into civilian channels.

Since all Egyptian labourers wore flowing robes it was impossible to search them unless you hung them upside down by their ankles, and women employed in the married quarters went home mountainous with the sheets and pillowcases they stuffed under their clothing. Even the men wore cache-sexes beneath their galabiyahs in which they secreted spanners, torch batteries, spark plugs, cap comforters, knives, watches, compasses and anything else that was small enough to fit in easily. Once when Dampier instituted a search at the gate of a maintenance unit the home-going crowd of fellahin collected in a scared gibbering group, and the ground where they had waited was found later to be littered with unexpected jetsam. Trains, whistling to waiting gangs, slowed down to allow bales and boxes to be tossed to the side of the track. Sleeping soldiers woke to find their tents gone. One bright spark arrested for setting up a totally non-existent scheme for which he drew labourers’ wages had actually received a mention in despatches for his work on it the day before he was picked up. You could buy counterfeit rubber stamps in the back streets of Cairo and in twenty-four hours have a set of forged papers that made everything easy and, because the Egyptian police were slack enough never to check lorries at the gates of the dumps, every crime imaginable involving bribes, stolen property and trafficking in currency was taking place. In many cases even the police were involved.

Dampier managed to get a few people jailed – a corporal caught driving a lorry containing a million cigarettes which no one would admit losing, a man running a mobile laundry that was the cover for the fact that he was pimping, a warrant officer running a repair shop who was equipping private cars, a welfare officer smuggling radio sets to Syria, Naafi managers flogging spirits from their stores. While Dampier regarded looting